Advanced manufacturing technology breeds an increasing amount of high-technology manufacturing equipment with increasingly flexible capabilities, increasing the variety of process routes and production jobs. In this context, manufacturing systems show high-nonlinearity, high-dimensionality, and complex-dynamic characteristics.

This explosion of complexity in manufacturing systems is represented in two aspects: firstly, the variety of processing routes will cause the random flow of work-in-process (WIP) to different machines in downstream stages, making the manufacturing systems show network structure characteristics when considering machines as nodes and WIP flows as arcs. This increasing complexity of manufacturing system structure enhances its high-nonlinearity, high-dimension, and dynamics. Secondly, in workstations, machines with flexible capacities will be assigned with various production jobs, which will also increase the high-dimensionality and dynamics of processing or operating works in manufacturing systems. Whether in the view of machines or operators, the variety and complexity of jobs will increase transformations in operation processes or cognitive psychological processes, making the workstation display complex and dynamic characteristics. Undoubtedly, with the increase in high-nonlinearity, high-dimensionality, and complex-dynamics in both system structure and job operability, enabling the reliable and economic operation of a manufacturing system is a great challenge.

The Special Issue aims to compile studies that address the advances in this field that introduce a new wave of transformation in the operational management of high-nonlinear, high-dimensional, and dynamical manufacturing systems. We invite papers of academic and practical significance that can provide novel contributions to address problems related to the various stages of complex manufacturing system analysis.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Operational reliability of manufacturing systems with complex topology structures
• Complexity and operability of production jobs in manufacturing systems
• Relationships between job complexity, operation reliability, and maintenance economics in manufacturing systems
• Impact of job complexity on the operational reliability of manufacturing systems
• Quality management in the context of increased complexity of manufacturing systems
• Maintenance optimization of manufacturing systems
• Economics of maintenance activities in manufacturing systems
• Cost-effectiveness analysis of human-robotic integrated manufacturing systems
• Failure mode and effect analysis of manufacturing systems
• Quality improvement practice of complicated manufacturing systems